Bed of Glass
by DollyPop12
Summary: Marie Mjolnir's life as told through fragments. Since she was a little girl in Sweden, before Kishins, and scalpel-happy, green-eyed boys, and surfing in Oceania, and reconstructing Death City, she'd envisioned her happily ever after. She just never thought she'd get it like this.
1. Chapter 1

**She breaks like dawn.**

She is warm and pink and golden with her hair in high pigtails to match her partner, and she's grinning, practically bouncing next to her Meister. Kami isn't the most sociable of people, but she's nice enough, and they make a good team. Marie was lucky in finding her, considering that she'd soul rejected all the Meisters at orientation, until Kami stepped forward to successfully pick her up.

(Some wouldn't even try, and that was probably the worst of it. _"Unwieldy"_ , was what they said, _"too much trouble"_ , and she felt heavy when they did. Her mother's voice would ring out, that she was a Mjolnir, only those with worth could ever pick her up. But everyone was worth something, weren't they? Perhaps it wasn't _them_ that was the problem.)

Kami was a good partner, strong. She made Marie feel like she was all steel wire and lightning. They'd just finished their mission and had defeated another kishin egg, walking in silence to go meet with Lord Death again. She'd been staring at the path, trying to memorise it for later when she spotted the boy through the trees, all alone. Her Meister was tall, so much taller than her, which Marie was both awed and annoyed by, and so she had to peek around Kami in order to properly see him.

Curious.

When his eyes met hers, she only blinked, grinning a little wider and waving behind Kami's back. And the boy, he looked like a strange one. What was in front of him was obscured by the forest and rocks and dirt, but he looked uninterested to whatever it was. Or, maybe, he was just uninterested in general: she'd seen him before, walking to his higher level classes with that redheaded flirt who wouldn't leave Kami alone. Personally, Marie didn't understand why her partner was so opposed to his affections: everyone could spot her blush even from four miles away.

Regardless, the pale kid seemed to almost. . .stare through her, with those eyes she'd never gotten close enough to pinpoint the colour of. And it didn't help that he peered at people through his long bangs. If she were closer to him, she'd see the barest furrow of his greaying brows, but she wasn't. She was walking with her capable Meister, walking to Lord Death to report about their most recent Kishin Egg collection. She nearly tripped over something, too occupied with looking at him, and Kami made a joke about how clumsy she was and that they had to hurry up.

So Marie gave him an apologetic look before she faced forward, keeping up with Kami's long, muscled legs.

* * *

 **She breaks like a rule.**

It hurts. Of course it hurts. Because this was Kami and Marie thought they were friends, and, she supposes, Kami thought they were friends, too. Her now former meister just looked so sad when she said 'He needs me', and Marie was too much of a hopeless romantic to hold a grudge against a woman who wanted to be with her boyfriend in his time of need.

That didn't change the ache. That didn't change the fact that she was now a Meisterless weapon and she didn't know how to wield herself, and she didn't think she'd ever know how to. She was a hammer, a Mjolnir. All her techniques required a partner, and she was a girl who strived in group work. How was she going to become a Death Scythe on her own?

She didn't know what was going to happen. Spirit had to move out of his previous arrangement because his old partner was still there, but he couldn't move into Kami's.

Not while Marie was still there.

The problem is solved in one fell swoop.

Lord Death's reasoning is sound. Stein, the boy's name, it seemed, couldn't be trusted on his own. He wasn't one who looked for connection, but he needed it. At least, that's what her principal told her. Lord Death was clear when he informed her that Stein didn't need a _weapon_. She would never be a true necessity because the boy learned to use his own soul to fight, but that she would be needed in other ways. In care. In friendship. She didn't have to say yes, Lord Death stressed that.

But she did. She accepted even if the counterargument was that he was a menace. That he broke his partner, cracked him open at night and dug around his insides, experimented on him. What was to say he wouldn't do the same to her?

But she thinks that everyone deserves a chance. That he never seemed cruel in her eyes before, all those times she'd spotted glimpses of him. Lord Death told her that Stein would be able to wield her, that he could wield anyone, so she wouldn't have to worry about Soul Rejection, and she thinks that a boy who could wield anyone has to be good, somewhere.

She didn't trust him, then. She couldn't. She didn't know him, but when she met him after he agreed to be her Meister, she looked into his eyes for the first time up close and sees that they are olive. She smiles and he doesn't but it feels comfortable.

He doesn't _seem_ unstable. Not around her. He just strikes her as. . .lonely.

It is never spoken aloud that she is supposed to keep her door locked at night. Neither of them ever say that she isn't to step foot into his room or that they are partners by convenience alone, that neither of them would have this as their first choice.

He is clinical. Their relationship works at first because it is professional and they are partners by order. Not acquaintances. Not friends. But their resonance rate is high and they are compatible. When he holds her, she feels like a streak of lightning and heat and she cannot help but open herself to him, her soul cracking to his, welcoming and willing. She does not have to with the boy who can wield any weapon, but she finds that after she does, he fits within her soul like the twined fingers of held hands.

They are too good a team. It is hard to remain distant after that, even a little bit.

So she takes her door off the hinges and looks him in the eyes when she tells him she trusts him. He paints arrows on the floors after all the times she'd mistakenly walked into his room and it takes him hours of his precious time, and he grumbles, but he does not stop until she has a path to every corner of their home. She studies with him in their living room; he bandages her wounds with a touch no one would ever believe was caring; she supports him against her when they stumble home after a battle, tired and successful; he makes her tea when she gets sick and she does the same.

They take care of each other. That was the deal between them.

She comes to realize that she's grown too attached. He was nothing like what they said he would be and if she hears the word "freak" whispered around them again, she will get another detention for punching students through the wall. She thinks she would call them friends, as everyone does, but the title pangs.

She wants to shutter his sadness away in her chest as her second heartbeat.

When others look at her, look at them, the unspoken is so thick in the air she can taste it.

Getting close to Franken Stein was frowned upon, especially after what happened with Spirit. It was a poor idea.

But she only clenches her fist when all her hand wants is to be wrapped in his.

* * *

 **She breaks**

She wakes in the hospital room with the IV line snagged and her Meister sleeping next to her, though, not in her bed. He is straddling a desk chair, looking as he always did when she'd go to wake him in the morning after he spent too long on his experiments, the night before.

For a short moment, she does not remember and does not feel. Then, as sharp and sudden as a puncture wound, the ache radiates throughout all of her. Her head feels gooey, her body tired and sore, and she makes a soft noise in the back of her throat, but she finds that it comes out barely as a sound at all: not even enough to wake Stein.

Then she remembers.

Or, at least, some of it.

She remembers the witch, remembers the fight, remembers Stein's charged wavelength, his hand coming out to electrocute the witch while he used Marie to block the attack she was slamming down into them. She remembers the agony, the screech she let out when the witch's spell hit, remembers being thrown from his hands and onto the floor and the brickwork.

She remembers him screaming her name, his attack missing as he had to dodge and she was his weapon, damnit, she had to get up, had to find it in her. She'd been nothing but a streak of lightning, slamming her fist into the ground until everything shook. Stein stumbled in front of her as she made the very earth quake, the air charged with the static she was giving off.

But her weapon form failed her: her blood refused to transform. When she ran forward, throwing her arm out, she was relying on nothing but pure strength, her body fleshy and tender.

It was the second collision she couldn't recall: there was the connection of her flesh against the flesh of the witch, the feeling of a sternum shattering under her palm, and then only blackness. If she thinks hard enough through the pain of her headache, she can almost recall a hand reaching to hold her jaw and a warm, wet feeling trailing down her cheek.

When she brings her palms back to her face, her fingertips catch the bandage.

Oh.

She swallows heavily. She knows it, deep inside of her. The tears stream down her face but the bandages over her left eye remained dry and scratchy, the blood having already clotted. There is only wetness on her right, and she goes to wipe away the watery mess. Her left eye stings with a phantom pain and she can only breathe heavily through her nose, looking down at herself and cataloguing what of her is left, what of her is bruised, what she still is. Alive.

Still alive.

Still alive and successful because her Meister is next to her, not yet disturbed by her choked down sniffles. She has done her job as a weapon, done it well, done it like her teachers always praised her for. She always knew that the line of work she was choosing was going to be dangerous. Missing limbs, appendages, eyes: these were sacrifices she'd agreed to at the age of twelve. She was sixteen, with her seventeen year old Meister asleep beside her, unknowing that she knew she was unable to ever see out of her left eye again.

It wasn't either of their faults. She knows that. But it hurts. It stings. It is a deep ache inside of her, this piece of her that will never be a piece of her anymore.

It was expected of her. For the good of her Lord. For the good of the World. For the good of her partner. For the good of the children that greet her when she walks by, who tell her 'Thank you!'.

She cries for what feels like hours, mourning. She is allowed to mourn. She refuses to take that away from herself, that right. The nurses are silent as a tombstone when they step in to check on her.

DWMA shouldn't be in a regular hospital. She supposes the worst of it is over, then. She must be recovering.

He does not wake to her sobbing. She does not sob. Her shoulders heave, chest lurching, body shaking, but she does not sob. And every time those nurses come in, she turns her face so the left side greets them, so they cannot know.

She doesn't want to deal with them. She thinks she can't.

It is only when she twists, reaching for her sheets to clean her face that she lets out a pained gasp, her side protesting furiously, and her hand whips back and smacks, hard and loud, against the bedside table.

Lord, her Meister lurches from his chair immediately, his eyes wild, hair long over his face, before he notices that there is no attacker. There is only Marie, and he simply remains still, silent, before he slowly gets up, his fingers reaching for her IV line to adjust it so that it was no longer snagged. And with an excuse to look elsewhere, she noticed how he refused to glance at her face.

He'd opened up corpses before, animal and otherwise, but meeting her gaze was something he couldn't seem to muster the courage for. There is an angry spark inside of her at that. A misplaced fury.

But she knows that isn't why he couldn't look at her. His hands were shaking, the muscles of his arms taut.

Death, he always hated seeing her upset, seeing her hurt. He didn't look like he'd even left her hospital room for weeks. The anger smoothed over, the static in the air calming.

"Franken. . ."

Even at her calling, he keeps his head down, making it seem as though he were busy looking over the work of a doctor's hand, a medic's hand that was not his own. Her brows furrow but the dull ache from the left side of her face makes her stop.

"Franken," she says again, and he must feel her unstable soul falter more because his hands still and settle on the sheets.

It takes him a moment before his eyes meet her and she flinches at how hollow he looks.

But she must appear equally as drained.

From her peripheral, limited, she can see cards and flowers, teddy-bears, which is such stark antithesis to the lab, to home.

She wants to go home.

She doesn't want to be there, doesn't want to have lost her eye, doesn't want to be in a hospital room, and against her will, the tears start coming down her face once more. With a hesitation that she knew down in the very fibers of her soul, he reaches out, so tentatively, to soothe over her hair, his calloused fingertips brushing her ear.

She knows he believed that he didn't know how to touch anything that wasn't already dead. She knows he is barely whispering his palm over her, so unused to comforting anyone. But it helps, which is why he does it.

His affection wasn't foreign, not entirely, but it felt stilted. His soul reaching for her own, though, that was smooth and practiced. In their resonance, she can feel what he will not say, and his wavelength tilts, morphing, until the resonance is stronger on his side and he envelops her soul, curling around it as though protection. With that, his hand roves down until his fingers hitch over her bandages, and she nods, barely a motion at all, to let him know that he can grasp them, and they fall away after the fact. When she peeks down to where they pooled beside her, she notes the ugly splotches of rust, dried blood caked so deep in the cloth, nothing would ever be able to wash it out.

Stein stares at her face for a few long moment before he stands and for a measly moment, she reaches for him, irrationally afraid that he was going to turn his back and never return. But he only flares his soul and it warms her, toes to scalp, everything inside of her meshing and even. She lets her arms settle back on the bed while he gathers up some materials, and when he comes back to her, he hovers over the bed instead of sits on it.

A washcloth, smooth, that he must have ran under water, because when he dabs at her face, at her eye that is not an eye anymore, avoiding the actual wound, it feels wet.

"Stein?"

There is no answer, only that gentle tending-to that no one but she would ever believe he was capable of. But she wants to know what happened more than anything else. She wants to _know_. She opens her mouth to demand his attention once more, but he must have felt satisfied with his cleaning, because he dropped the cloth off to the side and brought his fingers to her face, soul warming in apology.

The pain is dull, throbbing, instantaneous. She gasps when he pulls her eyelid open: his thumb on her cheekbone, index finger beneath her brow.

She squishes her other eye closed, her right, and she is absolutely sightless. It _burns_. But he stares at her, coaxing their souls and adjusting his wavelength so he can remain in resonance with the jittery jumpiness of her own, and when she finally opens her eye once more, the back of his free hand wipes the tear away with a tenderness that was near-overwhelming.

"It's gone?" she whispers, and he nods, expression unreadable. She takes in a deep breath through her nose. "The witch?"

It couldn't have been for nothing. She thinks that would destroy her, if it was. She thinks it would be the end of everything: Stein looked to be unharmed, his movements still as fluid as before, nothing indicating pain or discomfort. She did her job then, it seemed, but she wanted to be sure.

At her question, the miniscule creases of concern on his face smooth over, just the tiniest bit. He reaches to the side, where she cannot see anymore, which pangs so painfully, and she hears a faint clinking to the side as he reaches for the table.

The soul he holds up to her good eye is mottled and purple and massive. The prize. She has collected her 99 souls prior: this was it. Since she was a pre-teen, that soul was why she did what she did, and she dropped her mouth open.

"Did you. . .?" she asked, unable to finish. But when she looked at him, he shook his head in the negative.

Then she. . .?

Her meister. Death, the spark of pride on his face would be noticeable to anyone. And it swelled beneath her sternum: her feelings flayed open, raw and charged. The tears welled up again, sliding down her face.

"Franken. . ."

He kept locked on her, not breaking their gaze or connection, even as she shuddered. When he held the soul out closer to her, it looked every bit the offering it was, a sacrifice that would make her one of the few Death Scythe's in existence.

But her stomach churned, she felt sick, her throat tight. After 99 souls, one would think she'd be used to the texture, but it always made her feel ill. And Stein looked at her, his head tilted curiously before he leaned forward, staring into what must have been her empty socket.

She knows what he is thinking before he is even thinking it, and it scares her, but his curious nature was thrumming and alive against her soul.

The nod is even tinier than the last, but it is a nod, nonetheless.

Slowly, with the precision and tact of someone suited for something other than righteous murder, he leaned over her, opening her eyelids even more.

If it were to be anyone, at least it was him: she trusted him with her everything.

And when he brought the soul to what must have been her empty socket, to where her eye once was and never would be again, to where she gaped, it was strange, but not unpleasant, the way the soul slid. Stein's face when he looked at her, watching the transaction as though enthralled, made something in her clench. She thinks she's never felt more stripped than then, when she brought the soul inside of herself and he coaxed her wavelength to flare open.

When she consumed it, electricity yawned in her body, brought each nerve alive and on edge. It wasn't pain, not really. It was. . .indescribable. She sucked in a breath, hissing, immediately reacting to how the witch's soul was changing the very fabric of her being. It felt like her skin wasn't her own, and she realized, when Stein's free hand came to her shoulder, that she was squirming. She met his gaze and didn't break it, locked, watching the strain on his face develop with the effort it took to keep them matched.

Her wavelength churned gold, her whole body glowing with her healing ability, and the colour came onto her Meister, creeping up his arms from where he held her until it slid beneath his shirt.

Perhaps there would be pain, were there not so much morphine in her, were she not in possession of a soothing wavelength. Perhaps there would be pain if she had to go through the change alone.

But she was shaking, so hard she wondered if her bones would knock together, shuddering in Stein's grasp. He let go of her face, but his hand stayed on her shoulder, thumb awkwardly rubbing on what skin she had exposed through the hospital gown. He absentmindedly wiped the sweat from his forehead away with the back of his wrist, an awed expression on his face. Marie saw the fresh blood on his fingers, her own, she thinks.

She. . .she does not _feel_ strong, does not feel like her teachers told her she would. Instead, Marie feels nauseous and boneless. Her stomach doesn't want to come inside out, like every other time she consumed souls, but there is no peace. She is still sad. She still aches with her loss, and though Stein is there, who knew how to comfort a grand-total of no one, but was making the effort for her, it couldn't change the fact that she felt shattered. Sensing it, he curls over her as though to eclipse her from the rest of the world, from the cruelty it brought, and swipes away at the wetness on her face, but she doesn't know if what he is wiping away is a teardrop or her blood.

She is sixteen.

She is a Death Scythe.

Her heart is a hammer in her chest.

 **She breaks like a word**

* * *

She misses everything. In Oceania, there is no Deathbucks and no Kami to talk about boys with and no Azusa to buy her maps as gag gifts. Marie gets lost at the airport, unable to locate the woman who would be her new Meister standing with a cardboard sign that misspells her name "Molner" in bold, black, magic marker. She wanders for two hours until she gives up and finds her way to a bathroom where she promptly uses the mirror to ask Lord Death what to do.

Her new apartment is clean and beautiful, she gets an office and more paperwork than she knows what to do with. What she is meant to call home is the bland colour of an eggshell and she finds that she wants gray back so badly, silver and chrome with quick flits of plush throw-blankets and flowers. When she brings in the daisies, they stand on her windowsill and she finds that without the haphazard gloom of a home she'd had to leave behind, they look too stark and plain.

She feels lonely. Her Meister, Merindah, is all business: a transaction of friendship and nothing more and Marie tries to come in closer to her soul, but though they are compatible, there is a hole somewhere inside of her that Merindah is unwilling to prod at.

Marie needs someone there for her, and she finds herself waiting for fingers between her own, only to be disappointed.

Boyfriend one in Oceania is taller than she is, which is neither difficult nor rare. He is sharp-eyed and white-toothed and he laughs at her jokes, of which there are many. He tells her she has beautiful hair, when she keeps it up, he tells her white is a nice colour on her, he makes her feel worthy.

The bill for throwing him through the restaurant wall eats six month's worth of her paychecks, after he tells her that her thighs are too big and he's been seeing someone else. The hospital bills, though, are excused under Death's command after a teary conference. She is seventeen and she misses home, and she misses _him_ , and she calls twelve times in one night only to get his dial tone, still set to "we can't come to the phone".

Boyfriend two tells her she cries too much, too often, too hard, too wetly and openly. She stops letting tears flow free around him and starts sending Azusa emails, because their time difference is a massive gap in her so wide, she feels isolated from anything other than space. The replies are slow, but calculated. Azusa knows her better than she knows herself, sometimes. Reaching her when she is still in Death City and Marie is in Australia, it is an impossible task. She asks how everyone is but Azusa always seems to gloss over the details.

Boyfriend two lasts five weeks. He mentions that he doesn't like to be tied down. He mentions that she would be gorgeous if she just lost a few pounds. She goes on mission after mission to be away from him, takes in Kishin souls and watches them pad her thighs. With him, it is only a single text-message that reads "I'm done" and she deletes each voice-mail he leaves asking her to take him back.

The third shows some sort of promise: he touches her like she is precious, cradles her face as though he is sculpting her skin. He keeps the lights off when she bares herself to him, he finds it hard to smile. His weapon form is smooth, precise: a stiletto dagger that his Meister uses to stab down and down until their enemy is nothing but a gash. She has only one good eye but she sees the way they work together. She smiles when she tells him goodbye and slaps her cheeks to stifle the crying.

Her first girlfriend doesn't last long: she is sweet and gentle, but she can feel how hesitant Marie is. Her palms don't feel like her own, her skin not fitting to her muscles like they should. When they kiss, it is a brush of lips and then a sweetness she could only have imagined in a movie. Of her, Marie can remember Belinda, a kiss on her knuckles, an "it's okay".

The others aren't worth mentioning. They are crass, sometimes, and kind, other times. One takes her to the movies every week, the other, not even once. One made her never want to wear a short skirt again and another showed her how to cook... well, properly enough. No one stays for very long: she is always too needy for affection, as they say, or waiting for something to happen. She will not change herself, does not compromise on her idea of what happy endings mean to her; she cannot find it in her ribcage to reconstruct that which she does not find broken.

She has lost count of the failed relationships she goes through, the people who do not want friendships afterward, until she meets Joe, who is both nothing she is used to and yet, everything. He feels familiar in no way but the one that counts: she can talk to him. He indulges her silliness, her clumsy hands: he does not push about the eyepatch she is unwilling to flip up and reveal the depressed eyelid beneath to anyone but the one who made her a Death Scythe.

Joe is her third Meister in Oceania, coming after the two who refuse to dig into her soul, the two who can resonate with her but cannot know her. Joe makes her feel like a bolt of pure energy.

He makes her feel like before, when she was powerful, when she was known, when someone bothered to know her. He doesn't use her to block but when he swings her down to the ground, down into the face of a Kishin Egg, into buildings, she is so full of voltage, she feels dangerous: a real live-wire.

It feels frazzled, sometimes. Sometimes, they are nothing but teeth on edge and static, things she does not want. She wants for them to eat breakfast together in the mornings, for them to share coffee, something he is so passionate about, over the crappy, scratched up table she bought at a yard sale.

But he makes her feel human.

He reminds her of belonging.

He reminds her of before.

* * *

 **She breaks like a vow.**

She is in Oceania for too long when she finds out. She's been away from Kami, away from Death City, for years when the news comes in the form of a creased letter, crisp, with sloppy handwriting. It comes in "I'm leaving". It comes in "It's too fresh". It comes in "I have to get away". The news comes from Kami, from halfway around the world back in Death City where Marie thought things were sacred. Where she left behind so much that she once loved, and some that she still does.

She could hardly believe it. Spirit was stupid sometimes, yes, but he loved Kami. He adored her. She was his partner, his friend, his wife, the mother of his child, what brought him stability. He'd openly wept at their wedding, an affair in which Marie was only one of many bridesmaids, only ever a bridesmaid. Marie had only been 14 at the time, three years younger than Kami, four younger than Spirit. She was only 14 and she heard them say "Till death" and she'd watched them kiss, watched Spirit grin so happily, watched him set a hand on Kami's already bloated belly. She'd believed them.

So what they were young? They'd married right after graduating but Spirit was a Death Scythe, Marie would become one in only a few more years. And their wedding was something from a book: she'd gushed about it to Stein, who'd been banned, for days. Even after moving to Oceania, she got pictures from Kami. Their daughter was the most genuine treasure Marie ever saw.

So leaving.

Leaving.

She wanted to punch Spirit's entire face in, but she was so shocked. The note was terse, saying that the divorce was finalized. Saying that it hurt. That Kami knew some of those other woman and how could she look them in the eye, now?

Marie's fingers crinkled the paper: her ringless, calloused fingers.

All these years she'd been with Joe and no marriage.

She'd believed them. She had stars in her eyes about happy endings and retiring like Kami did to raise a sweet little girl. She'd envied so deeply, been happy for them even more so.

It was a bitter pill.

* * *

 **She breaks like a heart.**

Not much time after Kami's happy ending falls through, somewhere in New Zealand, that's where Joe cuts it off with her. He isn't her Meister. He hadn't been her Meister since their fourth or so mission, after he ruined his ankle fighting the Shark Witch, and he'd been moved to a less active department. It didn't matter much. She preferred it that way, if she were being honest, because she hated fighting. The feeling of being smashed into something... well, it was exhilarating, of course, but it _hurt_. It sent shudders of violence sweeping in her very marrow, it tore at her soul. And her Meister, of course, had to share that with her.

No, better she was with a man who fixed instead of flayed. A man who repaired ruins.

But he could still ruin, couldn't he? Could still destroy, leaving her standing in the restaurant after he told her that he couldn't do it anymore. Couldn't be with her anymore. And when she asked him why, he said that he just couldn't: that she should find someone else. That he wanted to end things on good terms with her.

Good terms.

Yeah. Of course. That's why he didn't call and didn't send letters afterward. That was why she wept on the phone with Azusa, the other woman uncomfortably delicate in her replies. That's why he never bothered to check in. That was why she spent all her free time from her duties on her couch, staring at her television with a box of tissues in her lap.

Were those good terms? She doesn't know. He wouldn't be the first person she'd treasured the company of who left her without a true goodbye.

She hates New Zealand.

She hates restaurants and Sixteen Candles and every movie that ends in a happily ever after.

She doesn't hate Joe.

But when she's off on another mission and her new Meister, a dark haired woman with calculating eyes and strong arms, slams her weapon form into the ground during a fight, she demolishes everything into a crater of dust and rubble.

And it feels good.


	2. Chapter 2

**She breaks like a fast.**

Coming back to Death City was always in the plans. Always. Oceania was beautiful, and she loved it there, but Death City was in her very blood. She was a Death Scythe, maybe not Death's Scythe, but she had a title, all the same, and a connection to Death, who watched her grow.

When she steps off the plane, she is jetlagged, so she sleeps in the taxi that was provided for her and when she wakes again, jolted out of her slumber by the driver gently telling her it was the end of the line, everything seems to move slow, swimmy. When she steps out, her bags in her hands, she spots Azusa in the flesh for the first time since High School and she can't help running forward, giddy.

Azusa doesn't appreciate the massive hug, especially when it brings her back a few feet, but she huffs and accepts it all the same, dislodging herself with an efficiency that seems practiced, though it'd been years since she had to do so.

Walking to school felt. . .strange. It was one step in front of the other, like before, but also not. And standing in the women's bathroom, that was weird, too. The last time she'd been there, she was cleaning up her mascara for graduation, nervous and scared.

It was no matter. None of it was the matter. She wasn't there for pleasure. The Kishin business was scary, terrifying, if she was being honest, but it would end. She wasn't going to be there forever, not unless she found a reason to retire, so she figured she should just buck up. Still, it is hard to take in, hard to swallow. These were the halls she'd last walked when she was eighteen. Now, on the wrong side of twenty-five (and STILL husbandless, Death, what terrible luck), they didn't feel safe anymore. Everything felt strange and foreign.

But not the shape in front of her. That one she was all too aware of and it sparked something back in her brain: she felt like a girl again in a plaid skirt, a girl with her hair curled just so and her socks sliding down her ankles and her heart hammering in her chest.

Seeing him was shocking. Seeing him next to Spirit, too, that was even more so. The last time she spoke to either of them, they weren't on good terms.

And then Azusa had to say it.

"Stein. . .wasn't he your first love?"

She wanted to turn around and high-tail it out of there. That was old history. Old, fruitless history. Stein hadn't even said goodbye to her; he had let her leave for the airport without him. He didn't even spare her a second look when she stood in the doorway and told him she'd call.

She did but he didn't answer. She tried, other times. But she gave up after a while. A long while.

You don't forget your Meister. None of them. She can name each person who picked her up with startling clarity, and when he turns to her and spots her there, finally, there is something gnawing in her stomach, gnashing and asking. He says he thought she'd be retired by then, and she doesn't want to remember how, when she told him, it was a hint. When she told him, back at sixteen, she'd looked up at his face, then, devoid of stitches and a screw through his skull, and wrung her hands and he'd only blinked at her impassively. Now she is an adult. She doesn't have the time for such pointless reminiscing.

Standing in Death's room, listening to just how dire the situation really was, that was her reality.

But being assigned to Stein again, oh, that almost stung. Lord Death knew it stung too. She could tell. It was the past biting at her heels and she knew why it was happening. They made a good team, they were strong partners, but neither of them needed each other as Meister or Weapon to function.

Yet, he still _needed_ her. That would always pull at her heart, how badly she needed to be needed, wanted to be wanted. And not as a weapon. Perhaps that was why she'd fallen for him the first time, all those years ago: he'd never needed her as a weapon and she was just so glad that it wasn't all he saw her as. She was his friend. His partner.

When he set his hand on her shoulder and teased her after she complained, told her that those obsessive tendencies she had would come in handy, it was comfortable again.

Her stomach felt hollow, but there was something fizzing in it that made her feel just the tiniest bit lighter.

* * *

 **She breaks like a wave.**

It is easy to fall back into a routine with him. Except, it is also not. The place she once called home is foreign anew, all the furniture she'd dragged in before stripped out, her old room turned into something of an oversized storage closet.

She can't blame him. She'd left so long ago, she couldn't have ever hoped to have him keep the place the way it used to be. She could, however, ask him to make it hospitable.

It was nice to banter about it: about the couch, the plants, the watering can in the shape of an elephant.

Sometimes, it almost felt easy-going, simple. Sometimes, she could forget. Stein was charmless and frank, and he didn't have a care about what others believed him to be. It pulled at her. He was funny, in a dry, creepy way. But funny. He made an effort.

And then there were times she had to remember why she had been brought back. When Stein started being affected visibly by the madness wavelength, when he couldn't hide it anymore, that's when it came to her in the most startling clarity.

BREW.

Oh, Death, BREW was a mess. BREW was holding him close to her in a way she never wanted, dragging him from a storm she wished they'd never stumbled into. BREW was falling against the stones of the ground, her entire weapon form scraping over the dirt. BREW was transforming, bruised, dropped, watching him collapse, having to rush forward and support him while his knees shook. BREW was seeing as he grabbed the crumbling rock in his capable hands that couldn't hold her, knowing he couldn't resonate with her, telling him to get a hold of himself.

And then those kids had to show up. Had to show up and she was the only teacher there that could still give rational order, but they were right. They were right and she was flickering, dissipating in front of her own eye. Behind her, while she is talking to the kids, the man she'd let go of falls into a heap, clutching the wall and his face, all but asking for her support because he couldn't even stand without someone there.

What other choice did she have but to leave the kids behind? She had to carry Stein out, though he was more than fifty pounds heavier than her, had to take him out of the tempest, out from the storm though she knew she couldn't soothe what he was thinking.

It wasn't easy. She could barely move. He was boneless and heavy on her, but he needed her, just like before. Not as a weapon, never as a weapon.

When they fell to the snow, she could barely bring herself upright. She felt dizzy and sick, fuzzy. She was fizzing out of existence but she had to get them. She was an adult, she had to be the capable one. She'd gotten Stein and she refused to leave anyone in that death trap.

Yet.

Yet she couldn't do even that. She couldn't wander back into the hurricane, couldn't stop mere children from running into the destructive tornado after their own comrades. What good was she? What was she supposed to do?

Stein's hand was warm on her knee, even in the snow, even in that baleful gale that threw her hair around her face, that chafed her cheeks raw and made her tears scald her skin. It was warm on her and she knew it was all he could give: the touch she wanted from him, a sign there was something in him she could still hold and protect, a piece that could remain untouched.

And then there wasn't.

Then, he was in spasms next to her.

Marie cries because it is all she can do. She cries and the drops don't stain her long coat: they are flayed off her face by the wind.

She is spindrift and salt and she hates it more than she can say.

* * *

 **She breaks like a fever.**

When she steps through the door, she knows. She has to. She's been around him for so long, how could she ever hope to remain ignorant? The bag of groceries falls from her hands and she is whirling back out to the humid air of Death City once more. Chasing after his ghost.

He's gone. He's gone and her heart is racing like nothing else and she is running immediately, out of the door because she can feel it in her very bones. She can feel his absence gape in the lab, once entirely his. Still entirely his, maybe. Maybe she was just a visitor there, a temporary fixture but none of that matters because he was nowhere to be found. She should have known. She should have felt it even before she got to the door, that he wasn't around.

They hadn't been able to resonate properly, for a reason she couldn't fathom, but she knew him. Knew him down to her very marrow and beyond. She knew his soul: people change, they can always change, but she'd be able to find him even without eyes.

She can't blame it on the door. She can't blame it on how distant he'd been. She could only blame herself. This was her responsibility. He was her responsibility.

Duty is not why she stays by him, but it's as good an excuse as any.

And after she has run for what felt like forever, directionless as always, she rushes through the gray and dreariness, hoping that, maybe with just one more step, she'd feel him again and know he was okay. Maybe she could have helped him.

After her calves are burning and her chest is heaving, she is all cold sweat and hot skin. She can't breathe. It feels like her sternum has shattered open into the air, like she is reaching for nothing, waiting for something to fill the empty space.

He is nowhere to be seen.

She doesn't collapse onto the dirt, doesn't bend down to the earth and cry or rip things or scream. She has no need to. He isn't there and she has a report to make; he isn't there and she has to go back to the lab even if everything there was touched by his hands first and that makes her singular eye sting.

Her insides burn and ache and hollow, and she stands up on wobbling legs. She doesn't know how far she's run. She can't know. She can't know where she is, or where he is, or if he is still able to have a place where he can be. She just knows that there is no body and she can find hope enough in that. That much, at least, is clue enough.

Marie finds her way home, alone.

She has no North Star to guide her. She thought she could have been the North Star but she was imploding in on herself, a flare of light in the dampened dusk.

She walks and walks and doesn't know where she's going.

But she's shivering.

* * *

 **She breaks like the clouds.**

The pillar doesn't knock her out immediately. She is still there, still conscious, though barely. Her head is spinning, her eye twitching and rolling, spine electric with the residue of his wavelength. Were she anyone else, she thinks it would have killed her.

He would have killed her.

Before, she would have wondered how much of that was Medusa and how much of that was truly him, truly something he wanted to do. She'd known him for so long, but she was always wondering. The pale boy no one trusted, who everyone said she was a fool to trust; maybe they were right the entire time.

But even if her body is humming, screeching at her, voicing displeasure in each nerve ending, she knows they were wrong. What man lost in his own head could dig himself out long enough to warn her?

She walked the desert for him, a woman without a map, without a chance to know if she was chasing nothing, but she was, if nothing else, someone who had faith in him. And his reaction to her was enough to fortify that.

Dimly, she hears the calls and screams of her students and she struggles in the crumbling rock he sent her through, but she needs another second.

Damnit, she didn't leave the DWMA to come back empty handed. She didn't quit the job she worked so hard to get just to let Medusa's barren wasteland of a hideout become her tomb. His tomb. Her students' tombs. She didn't leave after two painful hours of burning that implanted snake up until she was spitting up ash, knowing that was why she couldn't resonate with him.

Finally understanding that she wasn't the problem.

She didn't leave just to be taunted by that witch, just to have her parade around Stein in a body that she stole, touch him when he couldn't consent to it. No, this was not the time to reminisce or attribute care where it might not exist, it was not the time to hope and find herself wishfully thinking.

But she can only crack her eye open, pain racking all along her vertebrae, unable to do anything else-

-until she hears the guttural scream and then she is moving off of muscle memory alone.

Maka is feral. Maka is **furious** and Marie can see Crona; sweet, small Crona who saved her from that trap when they first stepped into that potential graveyard; bleeding and pale, off to the side. Maka is hellfire and rage and she is throwing Soul into an arc at Stein who can't dodge her forever, and that blade glints and Stein stumbles.

Marie kicks off the wall, dislodging her limbs and knowing that rock is crumbling around her before she decimates the crater even deeper and she is racing to him, sailing through the air.

When her transformed arm catches Maka's blade, when her glowing palm finally, finally touches onto his chest, she can breathe again. Her lungs are cold and they feel shriveled and busted, all of her a mass of tenderized flesh, but when she forced her wavelength, reaches out to resonate with him and his soul latches onto her own almost immediately, she just feels them click together.

"I've finally reached you. . ."

She doesn't fall into his soul. She is welcomed by it. He reaches for her like a drowned man gasping for air and she can bring the oxygen. He reaches for her like he is parched and she is the rain-bringer. Here, she needs no directions. In his soul, she can walk past all the conflicting arrows, past the cobblestones, past all of it until it fades around her.

She walks until it is only him. The buildings and the blood and the operating room and everything else is just an echo taking place out of her sight. She walks until she is standing behind his back and the radio spits his own voice back at him, garbled, and she wants to touch him but she is not Medusa: she asks first. She needs his trust, his say. She could drag him out, again, take him from the riptide. But nothing would change.

She isn't his band-aid, or his nurse. She is no savior.

He needs to know, needs to hear that he isn't broken, needs no saving, no healing, no fixing. That everyone else is wrong. That he is who he is, and good, bad, thick or thin, he cannot and should not change himself. Her Meister who used to catch stray rats and rabbits to dissect, her Meister who made jokes that had the whole class shuddering, her Meister who never studied and got full marks, who avoided people because he didn't want the ache they brought, who found friendship and love, anyway, who reveled in that: he was just fine the way he was.

So she smiles so tenderly that her eyes have to close. So she tells him he isn't broken. So she tells him the truth.

"There's no need to fix it. . .or destroy it, either. You just have to accept it as a part of you."

And when she opens her eyes, two eyes she has not had since she was a child, the witch's soul she consumed as a girl makes her wavelength flare out of what would usually be an empty socket. That is something they share, too. That memory.

He has turned to her, his face open and vulnerable and so tired. She is stripped to the soul in front of him, bared completely with nowhere to hide so he sees that all she is wearing is her smile and her honesty.

He believes her. He believes her and she is leaking golden light into each dark patch that he thought had to be holed away.

He grabs her hand, and he leans to her, soul and body, both, and he hooks his chin over her shoulder, and he is with her, again. He is there. He smells of damp air and cigarettes, he feels warm and sturdy, and he murmurs her name in her ear as though it is his talisman.

"Welcome home, Stein."

* * *

 **She breaks like a day.**

The relief she feels when she is assured, for the tenth time by Stein, that Crona will be okay is palpable. It courses through her each time he says so, because she still has to forgive Crona, and she will. She will. She owes them that much.

Without them-

She doesn't want to think about it. There's no point in the could-have-beens and ifs. The disaster of that tomb is behind them and she never wants to think back on it. Thank Death for Maka and her Genie Hunter. For the briefest moment, Marie'd looked at the girl and all she could see was Kami with the fire in her eyes. The thought didn't last for very long, but it had been there.

But that was a thought for a different time, Maka and Soul and the parallels she could see. Life didn't work that way, neat and tidy and one foot falling into the hollow of a footprint previously made. There was no set path. There never was. But if there was one thing Maka shared with Kami, it was determination.

Marie had faith in those kids. She had to. They'd made miracles before.

But she was fretting too. They were off fighting the Kishin and she was stuck in that too-small infirmary room at the DWMA that she was nervously tidying, but she trusted them.

Hope hadn't let her down.

She takes a peek at Stein, sitting off to the side after checking Crona's vitals again, and she finds him already looking at her with something unreadable on his face. She blinks at him before she registers that she has a clear view of his olive eyes and she finds herself surprised. But he looks almost. . .tender, and she feels warm at the fact.

When the ground shakes beneath her feet, the first thing she grabs for support is the desk he is sitting at.

His hand comes over her own.

* * *

 **She breaks like a bone**

She doesn't know what to do for days. Maka and Soul, Black*Star, Tsubaki, Liz and Patti, Kid, all of them are hospitalized for what seems too long a time. Crona stays with them, even though the swordsperson is more or less healed due to their black blood: they have found their own family and they will remain by them. It's beautiful, in Marie's opinion. The child was so full of love, it almost ruined her when she told them they were forgiven and all Crona could do was sniffle.

Everything is put on standby. Stein practically ends up living in the infirmary with Nygus acting as a nurse to the children as well. Classes are all cancelled, the entire city is under construction.

Death has a chunk blown out of him and it is still healing when she comes to see him. He asks her why she is there and she is confused for a moment because protocol is that she gives a mission report but then she remembers that she is not one of his weapons anymore. She is not a teacher at the DWMA either. Not that she would have been for much longer either way, since Stein was back to who he was before the madness wavelength and he could take his position back. She was temporary.

But it didn't feel like she was.

Death asks her why she is there again, and she can only inhale and tell him she wants to visit the kids, and even through the mask, he seems to know what she really means.

"That's good," is all he leaves her with before she's walking out and letting her feet lead her.

Stein's face is tired when she sees him smoking outside of the door to Soul's room, and she can find it in herself to make some comment about how those cigarettes will kill him. His smartass response about how ridiculous it would be to die of tobacco after all he'd been through is enough to tell her he's okay. When he only puts it out, dragging the lit end over the wall and leaving a rather obvious mark, she almost wants to chuckle.

He looks at her, both of them so tired. The man is three parts eye bags and two parts frown, but there is something easygoing about it all, regardless of that, and he lightens up a bit more when she seats herself next to him, settling beside him on the floor.

There is no "So," trailing off into the air, spindling into the awkward. There is no "Thank you" that leaves nothing but a gush of strange affection, too sickly sweet in the light of recent events. There is only Stein and Marie, sitting beside one another. She is comforting and comforted, both, with the idea of that, the simplicity. The silence doesn't stretch and it doesn't stifle her, but she isn't sad to see it crack aside.

"Are you ready to go home?" she asks, and she knows it is a question with a phantom net of other questions beneath it. And he knows. So all he does is tip his lips up, reaching to take off his glasses and rub his eyes before he turns to face her and she finds their gazes locked on each other.

"Are you?"

She doesn't nod, she doesn't answer him with a "yes". Marie wants to know if he understands that home is not Oceania anymore.

She wants to know if he understands home smells like cigarette smoke and antiseptic and him.

* * *

 **She breaks like a voice**

She doesn't know what she is doing. She wonders sometimes if she ever did, but since coming back, returning from that would-be-could-be tomb with Stein, Rachel, Crona in tow, she's felt locked somewhere in limbo.

Repairing the city was proving more of a difficult task than anyone had ever imagined. Getting the city back to Nevada, that was a fight in and of itself, especially with so many people out of commission. Maka. . .Maka was having the hardest time out of all of them, and even after everyone else was healed, Soul walking with the slightest of limps, Maka was still on a drip.

Marie picks up the odd jobs. She tutors students who are diligent and don't want to fall behind, she volunteers to contribute her wavelength for those who are still healing, she walks to the adoption clinics for the animals and takes care of them.

She doesn't know what she is doing.

It is under the request of Azusa, who is in charge of trying to organisze the city, for Marie to go and work on the construction. She says yes because at least it is direction: she feels so directionless, recently. Stein has said nothing though her head still rattles and her spine still shivers and she can still remember the feeling of being knocked into the wall with the force of an electric wavelength that was always nothing but comforting before.

It is under a request that she walks to the site and when she sees him, sees Joe, when she spots the familiar shorts he wore in all climates, freezing or burning, she wants to coil her insides up. Her heart jumps, ventricles clenching and soul shimmering.

It had been years.

She had spotted a glimpse of him when the kids were fighting the Kishin, but she was so wrapped up in Crona and Stein and the fact that the world was falling around her ears to take much notice.

She thought he had left.

He is facing her by the time she has noticed, no doubt due to the soul perception that had only gotten stronger since the last time they'd talked, since she'd last been in left in that fancy restaurant she'd thought would be where she could say she shed her title of "Mjolnir".

She doesn't breathe his name, she doesn't recall the ache of lying on her couch for hours, rewatching romance movies and wondering why they always had the same endings, the same happy faces, the same outcome that was not her own. She doesn't breathe his name but he is looking at her, his eyes opening as though in surprise though they are nothing but knowing when he looks down upon her smaller form.

She doesn't know how they start talking. She doesn't seem to know much of anything, anymore. She wants a map, she wants to feel less off kilter, less suspended in the day to day life she has found herself in.

" _Former Deathscythe. Didn't you quit?"_ Medusa had taunted.

And she did and she never knew how much she'd identified with it, how deep that destruction, that title rang in her. She was not Death's Scythe.

She hadn't been Death's weapon for a long time. She left knowing she was going back to the hands she felt she belonged in.

Death, she didn't even know he was in the city. Couldn't someone have told her? Couldn't anyone have given her a warning that didn't leave her feeling as though the floor, shaking from the whir of the power tools trying to repair cobblestones, was opening up beneath her heels and swallowing her into the maw of the earth?

He says her name and it is the first time she has heard his voice since she was twenty-three. Since before she passed twenty-five and her next boyfriend told her she was getting too old. Since before she punched him into the wall and had it come out of her paychecks for four months.

She wants answers. She wants to turn around. She wants to ask Azusa if she knew, as Azusa always knew everything, no matter where the information came from. Though, not everything, it seems. Not the things she needs answers for.

Yet her lungs don't feel soppy and full of liquid mercury, she doesn't feel heavy or like heaving. She looks into his eyes and she cannot find the sorrow knotting inside of her as she thought it would. She'd imagined the moment too many times to be healthy, asking him, demanding for him to tell her why.

But when she opens her mouth, it is almost pleasant. There is no chilly air passing through them, lowering the temperature even under the sweltering sun. There is only them and the smallest hint of wonder on Joe's face.

They work well together. They always have. They likely always will. There is no need to resonate, and Joe merely runs down the plan of what she was responsible for: her title of Pulverizer, still in place despite the fact that she no longer has a job in the DWMA, will make for quick work of the half crumbled pavement. She could remove it all in less than half an hour and allow for the second wave of volunteers and construction workers to get started on reworking that particular patch.

It is only afterward, as she is leaving, that he says anything more to her.

She wants to say that she expects it. Expects for him to put his hand on the back of his neck as he looks at her, his mouth seemingly being chewed down nervously, as was his habit even back then. Expects for him to ask if she's had lunch yet, and, if not, they could go get something if she was feeling up to it.

It reminded her of when she first came back to Death City. When she first stepped foot inside and Spirit asked her if they could talk: he wanted forgiveness, acceptance, reassurance, at least, since the last word she had about him was that he'd ruined one of her close friends down to the very veins.

It felt that way. Felt like he wanted to smooth over anything that happened.

So she says yes even though she is not hungry. Her stomach doesn't churn, her guts do not knot themselves into bows, intestines looping and looking to burst. It is easy. It is airy.

It doesn't feel real, sitting across from him, talking over a meal she isn't interested in eating, asking him, finally, why, and getting an answer that was more than "I can't".

"I was scared at that time. . .when this ability got stronger. . .seeing everything about you whom I loved so much. . .that's why I kept my distance."

She was waiting for him to tell her that he regretted it, that he stopped being so cowardly: this man who once gave her a necklace of teeth from an eel he wrestled himself, this man who she once wrapped her arms and soul and self around, this man she'd imagined at the end of an aisle.

It was always the same, at the end, the reason her relationships failed. She was too clingy, too idealistic, she wanted security and everyone else was afraid of commitment. Afraid of committing. To her.

Yet, she couldn't blame him. She couldn't find that sad, angry knot inside of her.

He looked like he was going to say something, that he wanted a second chance, maybe. When he opened his eyes, bluer than the Oceans she used to go surfing in with him when they were stationed together, she could see a residue of regret, and then it was gone. With a start, she realized that she'd been expecting a different colour, one that was closer to the dull green of the grass beneath her feet in autumn. As though sensing that, he shifted his focus to her chest, where her soul was, undoubtedly, flickering and alive.

"I'm sorry," he told her, and that was all. There was no pleading for another date, for another attempt. There were no asks regarding how she'd been.

He'd said "loved".

He was afraid to know her. The hurt was missing, the sting. Sure, it was easier when parts of someone were hidden, when you could turn your face away from them. But she wanted illumination.

Marie never had anything to hide. Never had a need to. And it made her sad that he didn't want to know all of her, was afraid that he'd find something he didn't like, that if he understood her in her entirety, he'd find the relationship failing.

If he truly knew her, he knew that she never lied.

And she knows, remembers, standing in a room that was not a room, exposing all of herself and reaching her hand out to someone who actually took it, someone who looked at how bare she was, stripped to the very soul, and stepped forward into her arms. And she felt bad. Then was not the time to recall events prior: Joe was-

-well-

-Joe just didn't deserve that.

But he apologizes, and she finds her mouth tipping up, despite how hollow she'd felt the last time a "Sorry" passed by his lips.

She didn't hate restaurants or New Zealand. She didn't hate him.

When she replied "It's okay," he knew it was the truth.

* * *

 **She breaks like the news**

She knows exactly how long it had been since she walked out carrying Rachel across her back as though she was the sacrificial lamb across her shoulders. That much is in startling clarity, the heat of that small girl who couldn't have known what she was being thrown in. Marie knows what it feels like to be invaded, the snake that Medusa implanted in her a taste of ash seeped into the tissue of her tongue.

Yes, Marie knew what it was like.

After they left Maka and Soul, left them to run after the Kishin, she walked next to Stein in silence back to the DWMA. She did not ask what he could have done: she had no need to know. Perhaps he wouldn't even know. He certainly seemed out of it enough that she didn't want to push him. And through the elation of being back with Stein who walked next to her with Crona wrapped in those blankets, the black blood coagulating, the child cradled against his chest as they swiftly made their way to the DWMA, that joy covered up the aftereffects of his attack.

Roughing it in the desert felt like she was sixteen again, before she became a Death Scythe. Before the cushy desk job at Oceania, back when it was her job to actively seek out Kishin Eggs, to consume their souls. Then, it was almost fun. Sitting around the fire with Kami, yammering about how excited they were to crush another creature and bring some more peace into the world.

When she was partners with Stein, it wasn't like that. He didn't bother with small comfort. No motels to crash at, ever, when she was his weapon back at the DWMA, no extras of anything packed. Hardly any time to relax. He had a vendetta against Kami, wanting to make a Death Scythe first. What better way to thumb your nose at someone than making their original weapon a Death Scythe?

So they didn't get the time for leisure. Stein patched wounds on the go, no time to stop. If there was an exam the next day, they just wouldn't sleep, throwing questions at one another and quizzing each other while they travelled.

That's why it felt the same and yet didn't, then. Sitting across from him, staring into the embers of the fire she made, Marie silent as the grave, Stein, the tombstone. They were taking the shortest breaks they could, more for Crona's sake than either of theirs, though she suspects in all the time Stein was gone, he hadn't even eaten.

He reeked so strongly of cigarettes, she wondered if he'd have to perform a lung transplant on himself.

Again.

That was the thing, with her Meister. What no one would bother to understand. He'd break his chest open time and time again, but if she so much as sniffled, he'd bring out the antibiotics.

That was why, still bruised weeks later, she refused to wear sleeveless blouses around the house, no matter how spoiling the heat became, and Stein never got around to fixing his air conditioner because he took it apart for scrap metal years ago. Marie was used to feeling as though she was being broiled, it was nothing to stay in that lab where everything was always slightly chilly due to how much metal he kept around.

The headaches wouldn't go away. She'd knocked her head so hard against that pillar when he'd first thrown her against it that she'd seen white plaster itself over her one good eye and she wondered for the briefest of moments if that was it: if she was done with having vision.

But then it all went black, her back shuddering, body immobile as she lay in that crater, heard the faint tatters of his tittering in her ears while she fought to remain as alive as she could.

She doesn't think he remembers. She knows he doesn't. There is no recognition when he looks at her, no guilt. There is too much they haven't talked about.

" _You're supposed to be dead."_

It felt like a bullet, when he said it. It felt like the char of a cauteriszed wound searing her shut the wrong way after flaying her open. It was one thing for him to leave: one thing for him to have fallen to whatever temptation the child-witch could have offered, whichever apple of knowledge she'd thrown his way (such a terrifying thing, to know), it was another for him to have believed her gone.

No wonder he'd been so inconsolable, so untouchable.

The wounds ache with the phantom pain. The migraines.

Death, the migraines.

They keep her up at night while she's trying to find a comfortable position in her bed, hands feeling out for another body she knows will not be there.

She hurts, but she is healing. She is almost glad he didn't inspect her for wounds, didn't demand. Crona was the first priority: Crona was always the first priority, that poor child that threw her out of the way of the falling boulder that could have crushed her until she was a flower pressed between pages, just a smear of blonde and red left on rock. No, best he didn't know what she'd gone through. Walking back, he'd only made the comment that she must have had a hard time finding him.

She wanted to tell him she'd walk worlds for him, wanted to inform that she had no direction, never did, never could find her way out of a hallway with just one turn, but that didn't matter. Instead, she only smiled the grin of a tired woman with too much on her lips, all of the words unable to convey what she wanted.

"Well, consider this my paying rent," she'd teased, her voice a soft wisp so as not to wake either of the kids they were carrying. When she'd turned to look at him, Stein walking on her left to compensate for her blind spot, he looked like he wanted to say something and yet, he didn't.

That was what he looked like, in front of her, now. Azusa finally broke the news that she was leaving Death City for East Asia again tomorrow, and Justin had already left days prior. Spirit was still nursing his injuries, but he sent in word that he was fine to go back to work.

And Marie?

Marie had nothing to say.

She considered packing her bags just for the sake of illusion, just to have Stein hold off on his questions. There was no reason for him to assume she'd left the DWMA, cut each tie, hadn't accepted her position back. When he'd fought Medusa, he'd told her the deal was conditional.

Perhaps he thought that was the loophole they had used, the one she had called upon. Not the fact that she was no longer affiliated and so, the deal did not apply to her. While everything was being rebuilt, there was nothing to show she was no longer a Death Scythe.

The others leaving, that was what tipped him off. She looked at her bags, still empty, and considered filling them.

But she didn't. Her things remained where they were. The pink watering can was refilled as the water ran low, her plant blossomed, showing beautiful flowers that brightened the grey of the lab, again, her bed was unmade every morning as though waiting to accept her back later.

She had no intentions of leaving.

Azusa announced that she was leaving Death City, and Stein must have realized that Marie was the only Death Scythe who had been stationed in a different place, the only Death Scythe to have come, that was not going back to the world they had left, seemingly, temporarily.

She missed the smell of salt on her skin and the sun giving her the rose-gold glow, but she would miss the cracked cobblestones under her feet, the dry heat of Nevada, the familiar atmosphere of Death City.

And him.

Death, how she had always wanted to be home, to him. A place he could find familiarity, a person he could find comfort and acceptance in no matter where he was.

She didn't expect for him to have become home to her, too.


	3. Chapter 3

**She breaks like thunder**

Death City has rain for the first time in what she later realizes is months. She is left waiting out the downpour in the lab she could find her way through blind and without touch, curled up on her purple couch with nothing to do. There are no papers to grade anymore because she no longer has students to assign work to. Instead, she finds herself reading her student's essays that she didn't have the chance to give back.

Tsubaki's is the first she picks up and Marie stares at the B minus she gave the girl for more moments than she cares to dwell on. How easy it was to pretend that such things meant anything. How simple it was, then, to hand out a grade and act as though it held meaning. Tsubaki spent two weeks in the hospital, her own blood fighting her. What business had Marie to assign such things?

Before she knows it, she is hunched over and erasing all the grades from the papers she had gotten.

Then, she is erasing all the grades from the alternative assignments. She pauses when she finds Patti's origami project, that beautiful piece of art she gave an A to: it was worth more than that. Her hands cup the creation, a human body with a small opening for the paper soul.

" _A sound soul dwells within. . ."_

Marie does not want to be emotional, in that moment, but the lightning flashes and she sees it through the windows of the house she has called a home, and feels her bones thrum as though in reply.

She wants a calling.

.

.

.

She should know by then that her Lord is one for theatrics, because it comes as a literal calling: a ring from the mirror she and Stein kept at the end of one of his hallways. And she stands from her spot on the couch to answer it as quickly as she could. Stein was sleeping, drained of all energy and trying to get in a few precious moments of rest after working nearly nonstop to treat the kids, and she is unwilling to let anything, God or otherwise, rouse him from the first nap he has allowed himself to indulge in.

Her lack of heels is, for once, a blessing. Between working with construction and being informed that she was to have proper nurse shoes when she was in the hospital, donating her wavelength, she has grown strangely used to flats. They make no noise and she glides to the gateway to their Lord with the silence Stein used to use to spook her when she first moved in.

She missed his silliness. There was a hope that it would return now that he could relax.

She accepts the call with no hesitation, and before she can even open her mouth, Death is asking if Stein is available to speak in a cheery, happy tone. The fact that she has not spoken to him in what felt like too long gnaws at her, gnashes her stomach to pieces.

"He's asleep," she informs, bringing one foot behind her and tapping it, nervous for a reason she does not wish to admit.

"Could you wake him?" he asks, and she looks Death in his eyes with her one, ready to deny him, but he only chuckles. "Ah, no. It's okay! Tell him to give me a call when he can!"

Her brows furrow. "Sir-"

It is the expectation that she will be cut off and the fact that she isn't that makes her feel embarrassed, for Death waits. Death waits for her.

But she does not know what to say. All she can do is blink at who practically raised her, her stomach churning. The static from the rain, the humidity wafting through the windows makes the back of her knees and neck sweat, and she feels herself being beckoned outside where she can slick her skin with raindrops and turn into the rumble of thunder. She wants to be intangible, wants to flutter aside like a sound people yearn to remember later: a symphony with no name.

"This is DWMA business," he informs her, gently. Death was tender, when he wanted to be. He knew when a soul was trembling, when she was ready to peel open and sink into the ground. The air leaves her body, the wet heat pressing in around her from all sides.

She must have choked out some noise of understanding, because Death only looks at her with something unsaid in the air, and then he is gone, his image a ripple that settles to the clean, reflective surface, once more.

DWMA business. Crona, no doubt. What other business can the DWMA have when it was barely even reconstructed? She is angry that the first priority is a second trial for a child who barely made it out of the meat-grinder of life, who fought for every breath they ever took in.

She thought of Crona who was practically living by Maka's bedside as the girl recovered. Crona who watched Marie when her hands glowed gold over Maka's stomach, trying to speed the healing of her fractured ribs, her busted gastro-intestinal tract. Crona who barely ate, not until Marie showed up with something the nurses gave her dirty looks for. She didn't know why they felt the need to be so haughty: they were working in the DWMA to treat the injured because their hospitals fell to ruin and rubble. It was Marie who knew the turf better than they did.

And yet, she also did not. For the first time in her entire life, she walked the halls of what had been her old school as a stranger with no affiliation. It wounds her. She knows who she loves, what she loves. She takes in a deep breath, finding her hand pressed to the wall as support. One of the sanded down, metal stitches found its way against her heartline and she could breathe just a little bit easier at the familiarity. Stein. She'd left the academy for him the same way he didn't come back after she left for Oceania. He had to know, at that point, what she had done. Why she had done it.

Why couldn't she have it all? What was stopping her?

She had been waiting for something to tip over but she'd been standing on the balance beam the entire time, teetering.

DWMA business.

The house rumbled with another shudder of thunder and her feet move before she can command them to, her breath fogging up the mirror once more, slim fingers writing down 42-42-564. When Death picks up, it seems as though he is expecting her, her Lord.

"I _am_ DWMA," she informs him and the air hums, her hair lifting from her shoulders with the static and electricity, her single eye boring into the black-hole of Death's gaze.

"Well," God begins, his voice not overly cheery or demonically low, only thoughtful. Her breath hitches in her lungs, the very world shimmering around her with tension.

"Of course," he continues, "You always have been."

* * *

 **She breaks like silence**

When she goes to see him, she feels like a girl, again. Not like when she would show up with Kami, but when she first came to Nevada from Sweden, the only Mjolnir to step foot near Death for over four generations. Back then, she was shaking in her fur-lined boots, gifts from her mother, only twelve years old with English foreign on her tongue. She was terrified.

She isn't, now. Not so much. Nervous is closer to how to feels, concerned, uncertain. The rain they had gotten makes the air feel thick and sticky, and when she steps into the half reconstructed DWMA, the dust seems to suspend in her throat with each breath she takes.

Walking to who she called Lord, God, Death, she is nothing but a hesitant foot in front of the other, walking a line as though she were walking to her execution.

But when she glides past the guillotine hallway, makes her way to the newly patched over Death Room, he is waiting for her with tea.

She remembers reading Emily Dickinson in her English Classes, such contrast to Soul Theory and Resonance classes. It was just a sliver of an education that was crammed into too little time, but it had been a joy to read the poetry, sweet words looping through her brain from the hand of a woman with so much to say. What was the line, again?

" _Because I did not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me"?_

She thinks it's a shame she can only recall it in fragments. She'd have to show Crona, though the book she once had with the poems in it was long gone. Just another piece of her past coming back to the surface of her mind, echoing out to her.

Death is welcoming, kind. He seems in good spirits though Spirit is nowhere to be found.

It is a serious conversation they are going to have, so she supposes it's for the best.

"Marie," her Lord begins, sounding kind, patient. "Have a seat, have some tea."

So, she does. Because though it is a suggestion, she is too used to following his orders not to. Sweet demands, gentle urgings, those are still commands, of sorts. It is too deeply ingrained in her not to do so.

She recalls each time she was in the room, prior. When she went on missions with Kami, when her partnership was broken, when she got the news she was going to Oceania, when she stood in front of Crona and told them she wasn't adult enough to forgive them until she got Stein back. That room had pieces of her in it, and when she looks around the walls, she can see the barest seam of where the reconstruction had to take place.

Everything leaves a scar then, it seems. She thinks she doesn't mind that, not really.

It is quiet as she sips her tea: ginger. She wonders if he is trying to tell her something or if it is just that he knows her stomach is sloshing around and she needs to be calmed from her nervous nausea.

"Would you like more tea?" he asks, and this time, it is a request instead of a push.

She supposes he knows her. Knows her like a father, like a mentor, like he who only wants her to be happy. She tilts her lips up into the barest smile and nods, cupping her hands around the mug and taking in how warm it became once Death poured her tea.

She taps her fingers against the table, indicating her thanks, before she takes a sip, closing her eyes to the steam. It makes her feel at peace, calmer, that he has done so.

When she sets her cup down, she can finally look him in the eyes. He'd been in pieces for a very long time, a massive chunk of him removed from the fight with the Kishin, and it was nice to look at his entire skull mask instead of just a fracture. It makes what she wants to say easier.

Slowly, she rifles through her bag and Death waits for her, patiently, until she pulls out a stack of papers and gently sets it upon the table. Her Lord moves his cup to the side and reaches out for a sheaf, skimming the contents. He hums in acknowledgement.

"So, an active weapon again, hm?" he asks, looking up from the document. Marie fidgets in her seat.

"I thought it was time to send in my application. . .again." Death only nods, picking through the papers.

"And I'll be sending these to Oceania?" Death muses, looking at her. Though she knows that all he has are two black holes, it feels as though he is drilling his gaze into her.

"No. . .I'm requesting active weapon status in Death City, Nevada."

"As a Death Scythe?"

"Yes."

"There are no positions available," he informs, not unkindly. Spirit has the only slot already filled and no city needs two Death Scythes in a time of peace, let alone when such incredible weapons like her students were up and coming, and ready to put in their own applications for jobs.

"There have been extra positions created, in the past," she argues, finding herself leaning over the table.

"There have been," Death agrees, looking at her with a curious tone. "But they were special cases."

"This is a special case."

"It isn't, Marie," Death informs her, gently. "You have no reason to remain in Death City as a Death Scythe. You have no child to care for, no injuries that would require you to remain. Oceania needs a Death Scythe."

She seems to deflate, falling back into her seat. It fulfilled her expectations, but she couldn't help but feel hopeful. "And if I submit a teaching application, instead?" she asks, chewing her inner cheek.

"All current openings are already filled, Marie. The only job available is the one you'd left," he tells her, but there is something almost amused in his voice. Her brows furrow, confused as to how casual he was being.

"Is there likely to be an opening in the near future?"

"Who can say?" he inquired, and she felt her eyelid twitch.

"You could," she mentions, meeting his gaze. Marie stares Death in the eye, not backing down, lifting her chin. Something seems to flash in the air, changing the feeling of the room, and she feels coiled too tightly before Death's voice breaks out in a proud chuckle.

"Ah, perhaps?" he says, seemingly to himself. "Perhaps."

And she watches as her God hums, gently setting her application back onto the table.

* * *

 **She breaks like a promise**

If there is one thing that the lab always does, it is take her mind off things. Walking back from the Death Room, with nothing but a vague "perhaps" is unnerving, and she feels like she needs to unwind. She doesn't know why she's holding so tightly to Death City.

But that is a lie. She knows. She has always known. As she walks into the lab, home, closing the door behind her, she follows the sound of clacking until she is leaning against the doorframe, watching Stein type. In the past, seemingly so long ago, he would only ever do so in the dark.

Everything was illuminated, now, and she was silent as she observed him, the way his shoulders were relaxed under his shirt, his lab-coat draped across the back of their couch due to the heat. When he chuckled, she wasn't surprised. He knew who she was down to the soul, it was expected for him to just feel when she was around.

And, of course, he could feel her tension.

It started as it always did, with him asking if they were going to watch the Discovery Channel, again. And she'd replied with a yes, the same as usual, though she did take note how he seemed more understanding than usual in the exchange. He didn't ask about how her meeting with Death went. He could just tell it wasn't exactly how she wanted it to happen.

So while she made popcorn, ready to ease her stress away with too much butter, he turned the television on, fighting with the transmission. It was a shame it was such an old thing, something he would only ever use to watch his recorded dissections on, prior. After the Kishin business was finished with, he'd surprised her with the knowledge that he had a TV, asking if she wanted to watch a documentary with him when he spotted how bored she'd been.

Since then, he'd wheeled the thing in and didn't bother to get it out of the room in order to transferit back to the dusty storage where it was once residing. A change in the furniture was in order, as well, and the loveseat ended up being moved, facing the screen for convenience.

When she walked in, the bowl massive in her hands, she saw that he had both arms draped across the back of the couch. She rolled her eye good naturedly. It figured he was always taking up so much space. She walked around so she could plop down, careful not to fall against his arm, and set the bowl on the table in front of them, since there wasn't much room in between them on the loveseat. Especially not when the bowl was far too large, considering three bags of popcorn were easy to inhale when she was going to eat her feelings away.

The documentary was boring as it always is, mind numbing, science jargon she finds herself blinking at, no interest flashing on her face. It all blurred together into one monotonous tone of mountain lions and whichever location they most thrived in. She yawned, blinking lazily as she settled against the back of the couch.

When she felt his arm slide down from its perch and onto her shoulders, she didn't think anything of it for a single second. But when he didn't move away, she blinked in surprise. Instead of instantly taking his touch away, if anything, he shifted, and she felt the heat of his side melt against her.

She does not mean to laugh, nervously. She does not mean to feel the blush come over her shoulders, where one of his hands has settled, his palm warm and tender against her arm. She does not mean to break the monotone of Mountain Lions with her ridiculous teasing of "Wow, maybe Spirit was right. It almost feels like we're really dating."

Her cringe is immediate, and she cannot even find it in her to move, to look at him. A ridiculous babble has joined her involuntary giggles. "Not that we're-"

"I was under the impression that we were," he tells her, and the confusion in his voice is enough to make her head whip around fast enough to give her whiplash. Her eye is wide, blinking incredulously the instant the words penetrate her skull, and when she spots the way his brows had come together, crinkled in concern, his arm coming off her shoulders as though unsure, she can only drop her mouth open.

"What?" she asks.

"I was under the impression that this was a date," he clarified, shifting around.

Fidgeting, she realized, his hands coming up to adjust his already perfectly in-place glasses.

Franken Stein was fidgeting. In front of her. Because of her.

"But. . .but you didn't ask me," she blurted out, lower lip still dropped in astonishment.

"I asked if you wanted to watch a movie-"

"But you didn't ask me on a _date_!" Marie said, her voice pitching up higher. But that was almost a lie. If she remembered back, asking someone else to watch a movie was a date almost always. How had she not realized? Had she only brushed it off under the assumption that _Stein_ would never do something like that? That he could never be interested in someone like her?

He was just a man. Even _he_ had trouble asking someone for intimacy. And he had asked her as best he could.

Because he was interested.

Dear Death, _he_ was interested in _her_. He had asked her on a date.

Why had she tried to convince herself otherwise?

When the realization dawned on her, that they had been on the same couch in the same situation, watching a film together multiple times in the past, she only chewed her lip. "How. . .how many dates have we been on?"

". . .a rather high number, if I had to estimate."

"We're. . .we're dating?

"I thought so," he said, and she saw something change on his face as his lips twitched. When the nature of the situation dawned on her, she couldn't stop the giddy chortle that she let out, slapping a hand over her mouth.

But before she even knew it, she was giggling, her soul shimmering in excitement and she felt so bubbly, all of a sudden, when his chuckles joined her.

When she looked at him, a grin on her face, it felt too comfortable to be anything other than relief. "I suppose it's a good thing I only kiss after the third date," she informed, teasing but not biting, nothing but a sweet wit, bringing her hand from her mouth and allowing her expression to be fully seen by him.

"Oh?" he asked, teeth showing with how wide his grin was getting to be.

"Oh," she replied.

"I thought I never asked you on a date?" he teased in response, his laughter finally dying away in favor of a softer tone. She looked away for a second, humming in agreement before she looked back at him.

"Alright then. Ask me."

His eyes were soft behind his glasses, glinting. And her own was crinkled in amusement, in how happy she felt. But her eyebrows went up when he didn't follow the script she expected him to.

"Then, can I kiss you?" he asked, not moving forward in the slightest. She found that she took in a deep breath, looking over his entire face for any hint of teasing, any sign of him being something other than genuine.

There was nothing she could find but honesty, and she wasn't surprised that she had already started to lean in, one of her hands coming over his own and slowly dragging up his arm as she twisted on the sofa. And yet, even with that, he did not move.

"Please?" she requests, and at that, only at that, he finally smiles, tilting his face toward her own. Her voice had been so low when she spoke, and they had already gravitated so close to one another, it was practically a whisper.

She knew Stein hadn't known how to be gentle, never had a reason to be, didn't think he could be, but she found herself leaning into each touch as he made it. His hands were calloused when he cupped her face, the palm warm across her jaw, his thumb absentmindedly, awkwardly, stroking over her cheekbone and it was the barest brush. He was so overwhelmingly tender, holding her like that.

The last time his hand had been on her face, it was crackling with electricity but she felt charged in a different way, like every piece of her was tingling, down to the very fingertips. He was a man who knew nothing of sentimentality, could never have known, and yet when he leaned in, his mouth finding her own, it felt like it was what he was created to do: to kiss her. They slotted so perfectly against one another, she couldn't help but press in. And he was sweeping his tongue over her lip, though they were chapped, and she couldn't help but be thankful that she hadn't bothered with chapstick or lipgloss. Her body melted to him as she breathed in through her nose as best she could, wanting to be connected to him forever.

Death, he kissed her like she mattered to him, like she mattered, and she brought her arm around him, tugging him down more, opening her mouth to him. Her hair was in the spaces of his fingers as he stroked the nape of her neck, making her shiver. Slowly, he dragged that touch down her back, his fingers smoothing over her spine through her shirt until he settled on her lower back. She arched into the motions, and when he pulled away from her lips, tasting like popcorn and smoke, she immediately went in for another, kissing the corner of his mouth and trailing down to his jaw.

It was heady to listen to him breathing so hard, and when the hand on her face moved her back so she could look at him, she was glad to see that the warmth on her face had a match on his.

She bumped her nose against his, the smile curving over her face.

"So," she started, breathy, every piece of her feeling electric and alive. "We're dating?"

She was so close to him that his breath fanned over her face, mingling with her own and she felt his chest rumble under her palm before she heard his chuckle.

When he tilted his face, moving forward and pressing their mouths back together, she took it as a "yes".

* * *

 **She breaks like a law**

Nothing truly changes between them. That's the best of it, that they are the same people they had been, just that, suddenly, they make out like teenagers on their own couch and laugh about how ridiculous they are when they have all the time in the world.

Peace is a concept that should not come so easily after the war they were a part of, but it is there. It feels like everything has settled, somehow, that the lack of balance, the teetering she has felt for days upon weeks upon months has finally stopped rocking haphazardly in favor for a smooth, solid ground.

That breaks open when she gets the news from Stein because she is not yet privy to the information from her Lord, and it feels like her heart drops to her knees. Her mouth goes dry, her hands shake.

A trial. Crona. Back on trial.

They were just a child. Didn't they give enough blood, already? Hadn't they proved themselves enough?

And, yet, she knows there were people who wanted to try them for the crimes, people who wanted a scapegoat, a decoy, to latch onto and scream for bones.

She has no pull at the DWMA, anymore. The only Death Scythe left in Nevada is Spirit, but one person pleading for the child's case isn't enough. Can't be enough. When she finds Stein's formal pardon on his screen, him asleep in front of it, she has the overwhelming urge to wrap her arms around him and never let go. Yet, she knew that wouldn't be the end of it, either. Crona's crimes against Stein weren't the only ones, and when Spirit comes, a grimace on his face, asking if she was interested in pressing charges as the two police officers behind him stare straight ahead, she nearly threw the door closed. But she knew Spirit didn't want to be there, didn't want to ask.

How could she ever press charges?

She had told Crona that she couldn't forgive them, all that time ago and suddenly, she finds it even more terrible of her. What other choice did that child have? What else could they have known? If Stein fell to Medusa, a man who had experience in resisting and grounding himself, how could Crona turn a blind eye when Medusa was all they'd known?

The paperwork makes her stressed. It makes her feel sick and tired, having to take turns on Stein's computer in order to complete all of it, all the pleas, the messages, constant emails, reassurances. Weeks pass like a haze, like a bolt of lightning. And when the day of the trial comes, the reckoning, Marie shows up at the DWMA, arriving like a storm. She is a hurricane of a woman, frazzled and angry. She is a cloud of frizzed, electric, blonde hair and so much rage coming off her skin it could choke someone. She is livid. Her usually gentle wavelength is amplified and harsh, all jagged edges and teeth. Only Stein, setting his hand upon her shoulder, is enough to calm her, and only slightly.

It does not prevent her from walking right up to Crona and setting a jacket atop their shoulders, looking everyone in the eye who so much as opened their mouths to argue with her. The lawyers say nothing, only glance at each other, and Death sits where the judge would be.

It feels like he is urging her on, cheering for her.

When she turns, walking to the bench where Stein has already reserved a seat, it is not so much waiting that she does so much as shaking. She bounces her leg up and down, itching to give the room a piece of her mind. Her students, finally healed, come before the jury, before Death, one by one to testify, to make their case, to answer questions.

They do not even have to call her to the podium. She does not have to swear upon any book, does not have to make her way to the seat in front of everyone else.

Her formal pardon is enough, but beyond that, she can see the case is won.

The verdict sounds like a safety precaution, something that would appeal the masses, a stricter, tight rein on the child who bounced sides. But it is not. It is, instead, a blessing. There is no punishment in what Death says, that Crona would have to be with someone from the DWMA at all times. Her grasp on Stein's hand, a hold she didn't even realize she had before the relief coursed through her, slackens before it tightens as a means of reassurance. He squeezes her fingers between his own, his expression placid and thankful.

But it is only days later, as negotiations are being made, that she realizes what the plan was from the start. What Death's plan was.

It is only after multiple calls, multiple debates. Her job application is still pending, the status unknown, dangling in the air. And yet, when Lord Death calls, it is not in regards to that.

She realizes after he tells her that Crona's place of residency was being debated upon. Maka had offered to take multiple classes with Crona so that she could have more ground for suggesting that they live with her, but it had been decided that they needed something more stable.

Something with a stronger healing presence.

She could only look into the mirror owlishly, as though amazed, the pieces all falling into place in front of her. Before she knew it, Death cut the call, giving her a cheerful reminder about her job application, and acting as though he were being discrete.

Exceptions had been made in the past. Death Scythes were known to stay in Death City, even when not necessarily needed, due to having a sudden reason to stay.

All it takes is a meeting of the eyes. Stein knows her and she knows him, and it is only a flicker of gold meeting green, a nod, a touch on the back of her hand, and she is already whirling to his computer with his blessing, finding applications of a different sort.

A healing presence, she thinks.

It was a strange way to call her "mom".

* * *

 **She Brakes**

It feels more familiar than anyone could have ever expected, than she had ever expected. She knew it was what she had always wanted, a family, a place to call home, but finally having that, it came more naturally than she'd ever dared to hope.

Her smile covered nearly her entire face, stretched so wide, so tenderly. Her singular eye squinted in affection and she leaned against the wall, one of the large metal stitches feeling comfortably cool over her long-healed skin. She is looking into what was, only a few days prior, the room where she had her things. Sure, she'd been spending more time in Stein's bedroom, but she still had her own, regardless of how cold the made bed was.

Not anymore. And, really, she hadn't ever been happier to share.

Death, she'd spent an entire day cleaning what was left in the glorified storage closet, bringing her things fully into Stein's room, so that Crona could have a place to sleep, a place to stay. And through the crack in the door, she could see the barest hints of personalized touches: the picture frames, the desk already covered in papers, the piles of clothes Marie'd insisted they buy the poor child.

They never had a thing to call their own, before. She wanted them to be happy, to feel safe.

To know this was not temporary. The adoption had finally gotten through, albeit with more than a few nudges due to Stein's less savory reputation in Death City, but none of that mattered. Crona had their own room, one she'd put dark curtains in so they felt comfortable, one she'd bought new sheets for.

The constellations on the ceiling, though, that was all Stein. Stein and Crona and smudges of glow-in-the-dark paint he spent three days creating. Her partner, Death, he was a natural at all of it, and she'd taken multiple peeks into the room, watching how. . .fatherly he was with Crona. It made something in her chest swell, a giddy feeling following her every time she happened to glance in.

She is brought out of her musings by a touch brushing her shoulder, barely a whisper. Stein flared his soul up to let her know it was him and she felt her grin get stronger when he did. Her Meister. Her partner.

Really, she didn't know what title they would really have, what she would tell her mother. She'd ask what they were, but there were too many answers to that. They were kissing. They were parents. They were partners. They were together.

Yes, definitely together. And that was enough for her no matter what. Had always been enough for her.

As she turned to him, she leaned in, her own soul pressing to his while she tucked herself under his arm, the two of them looking through the crack in the door for a second and taking in the domesticity.

It felt nice, to have that stability. It felt comfortable. It felt like being happy.

Marie turned and kissed Stein's neck, fluttering her eye shut and knowing her eyelashes were tickling against his stubble. She felt his chuckle against her palm, realizing that she had set her hand on his chest as she nuzzled at him.

His wrapped his arm around her, curling and taking her in closer, and when she pulled back enough to look him in the eyes, again, he had tilted his face down, stooping slightly.

In the moment before she went on tip toes, one of her hands coming to cup his cheek so that she could brush their lips together, she can almost feel him memorizing her face, smiling at what he saw.

Taking in the fact that she was warm. And pink. And downright golden.

* * *

 **Well, this is it! It's the very end of my Resbang career for 2015! Massive thanks go out to my main betas, Crimson-Lia and Jcrycolr3wradcse, who put up with my constant whining, my ridiculous amount of "I can't do it!" and all my writing. I sort of bombarded them, and this fic, as well as the others, wouldn't have happened without them.**

 **Thanks also go out to my excellent arts who I was lucky to have, ShowKnight, found at showknight (dot tumblr dot com) and L0chn3ss, found at l0chn3ss (dot tumblr dot com). Links to their art specifically will be posted up as soon as I get them!**

 **Thank you for reading and for staying with me through this RIDICULOUSLY long Resbang Journey. I clocked in over 117K words this year, and I'm already looking forward to next year. 3 3 3**


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